November’s Worthwhile Reads

The Learning Pond, “Template for Faculty Poster Conference via St. Andrew’s, Potomac”
“Poster sessions have been a cornerstone of academic conferences in many disciplines for decades – but not education. And this is strange because it is a perfect forum to share, examine and reflect on the work we do. This event not only professionalizes our pedagogy, but it also encourages an informal, creative space and time for conversations among colleagues to happen. This event is a beacon and a forum. It inspires us to keep rigorously and enthusiastically addressing that fundamental question, ‘what is great teaching?’”

Granted, but…, “On Feedback: 13 practical examples per your requests”
“As readers may know, my article on feedback in the September edition of Educational Leadership has been one of the most widely read and downloaded articles of the year, according to ASCD data. That’s gratifying feedback! . . . But numerous people have also written saying that while they liked the piece, they wished that I had provided more specific examples of how to design in such feedback, how it all works in practice. So: Voila! Below, find thirteen examples of how teachers have made feedback (as opposed to advice and evaluation) more central to their work with students.”

New York Times, “Regrets of an Accomplished Child”
“I was one of the middling sort, endowed with a reasonable amount of natural ability. But, I figured, if all went according to my carefully hatched plan, I could graduate with all my “to do” boxes neatly checked off, my teachers impressed if not wowed, and the ultimate achievement: an acceptance letter from the Ivy League college of my choice. It all went as planned. I didn’t learn much of anything.”

The Historical Society, “San Francisco, the 1906 Earthquake, the Progressive Era”
“San Francisco has become for me the quintessential Progressive Era city for another reason, too. In 1905, a photographer attached a camera to a trolley car traveling along Market Street. The result was a nine-minute recording of urban life before the reforms of the Progressive Era. There are no stop signs, no traffic lights. Children are playing in the streets and running in front of the cars. People are walking, horses are pulling carts, and automobiles are in a free-for-all on undivided roads. It makes you realize how many of the world we take for granted today was, in fact, a product of the efforts of reformers to draw up some rules to make the modern world safer.”

The New York Times, “A School Distanced from Technology Faces Its Intrusion”
“Past the chicken coop and up a hill, in a spot on campus where the wooden buildings of the Mountain School can seem farther away than the mountains of western New Hampshire, there sometimes can be found a single bar, sometimes two, of cellphone reception. The spot, between the potato patch and a llama named Nigel, is something of an open secret at the school in this remote corner of Vermont where simplicity is valued over technology. ‘We’re at the periphery of civilization here,’ said Doug Austin, a teacher. But that is about to change.”

Blogg-ed Indetermination, “Left to Their Own Devices”
“But schools are foremost places of learning and teaching and the role of IT is to facilitate rather than to encumber these ends. Given the role that technology plays in the lives of teachers and students it therefore makes sense that IT departments provide a safe haven in which its users to become self-sufficient, confident managers of digital devices. Yes, some users may screw up their computers. Some may inadvertently download a computer virus. And I can practically guarantee that many users will store personal data on their computers. But I also know that if you treat people with respect and given them responsibility that the vast majority will demonstrate that they deserve your trust.”

Education Rethink, “Post-Election Thought”
“What if the other side isn’t heartless or lazy or even misinformed? What if they simply see the world differently and cannot fathom the notion that you have the same end in mind: a healthy, strong, free, safe nation? This isn’t a call to put aside our differences. If anything, I think it might be a time to clarify the big questions about the role of government in our lives and what that means in both social and economic terms. Howeevr, this is a call to recognize that the differences in worldview do not mean the other side is inherently evil.”

it’s about learning, “Gijs van Wulfen’s map for innovation”

The History Channel This Is Not…, “Historical Haikus – Final Exam Edition”
“So, I just finished administering my Fall Trimester final exams and am now in the midst of grinding through the grading in order to maximize my holiday merriment. However, I stole an extra credit idea from one of my colleagues who had offered a few additional points on the exam for writing pertinent historical haikus. This idea turned out great, as a number of students wrote very entertaining and some pretty insightful haikus. I’ve posted a number of them below, and for the sake of haiku fidelity, I omitted any that veered from the syllable pattern in spite of the fact that some of those were really good. . . .

Sparta and Athens,
Fighting over their power,
Caused damage to both.

Away with the knights
And down with Feudalism
Renaissance begins.”

The Historical Society, “Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions”
“Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade ‘Memories of Christmas’ print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.”

John Fea’s Virtual Office Hours

it’s about learning, “Brain Food: Education @Unboundary”
“We also enter this challenge offering Brain Food: a proven approach for shifting the din of idea-sharing into a useful design-thinking discussion. Brain Food is curated provocation. It is both question and answer. It is both perspective and focus. We welcome you to Volume One, Number One of Unboundary’s Education Brain Food. And we look forward to the discussion it opens among us.”

Seth’s Blog, “Non-profits have a charter to be innovators”
“The biggest, best-funded non profits have an obligation to be leaders in innovation, but sometimes they hesitate. . . . The magic of their status is that no one is expecting a check back, or a quarterly dividend. They’re expecting a new, insightful method that will solve the problem once and for all. Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don’t.”

Spreading Myself Too Thin? Why Pedagogical Master Planning Matters

Am I spreading myself too thin? More importantly, perhaps: Am I spreading my students too thin?

Lately, I’ve been giving some serious thought to this question. Beyond simple content coverage, there are so many things that I want to accomplish in my classroom, and every year, it seems, I add a new wrinkle or two. I come back from my summer adventures in professional development excited to try something I’ve learned, but I never seem to take anything off my plate.

In my American history classes, for instance, I now try (or have tried) to incorporate a year-long scholarly research project/paper, a class blog, (almost) daily Harkness discussions, explicit instruction in historical thinking, classroom community-building and experiential learning activities, project-/problem-based learning, and some form of public speaking.

I believe that all of these add to my students’ experience, and none of them has detracted significantly from my core commitments to critical exploration of the past and a focus on strong persuasive writing—at least not yet. I do fear, however, that I may be doing my students a slight disservice.

In some ways, my approach to educational methods runs counter to my approach to historical content. When it comes to content, I tend to favor a “less is more” approach, slowing down to explore smaller chunks of material but in much greater depth. As I reflect on all of the things I’ve added to my “pedagogical toolbox” over the years, though, it occurs to me that I have been emphasizing variety of experience over depth of engagement.

Would it not be better to pare down some of these things to give my students a clear, sustained focus and the opportunity to truly master one or two experiences? I’m not entirely sure yet, but I think it might.

The problem is, I find myself pulled in two directions at once: a somewhat traditional desire to focus on the things I do well—that is, historical thinking and clear written and verbal communication—and a nagging sense that education must evolve to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. To be sure, I believe that the things I do well are timeless in their importance, but that’s not to say they’re more important than the others.

These two roads are diverging in my proverbial yellow wood–which path should I choose? Again, I don’t know; I’ll have to keep wrestling with the question. (I suspect a lot of teachers are confronting similar concerns these days—at least, I hope they are.)

All of this said, I do think that this is one reason why Bo Adams’ exploration of “pedagogical master planning” is so attractive to me. I think all of my various approaches have merit, and I want my students to experience them all, so in the absence of a comprehensive master plan, I end up trying to do more than I can successfully handle. If I knew that students would encounter some of these things in other classes or in co-curricular/extra-curricular settings, I might feel less pressure to incorporate them into my class.

By establishing a master plan, then, schools could achieve a sort of “internal comparative advantage.” Teachers who are best equipped to provide students with Experience A are charged with doing so, while Experience B falls to those teachers who are best suited for that particular task. In the end, as I see it, the master plan would not be an exercise in administrative autocracy or classroom conformity, but rather an attempt to deploy a school’s resources–human, financial, natural, technological, etc.–in the most productive way possible. Students could enjoy a rich variety of educational experiences, and faculty would be freed up to focus on the things that they do best, all in pursuit of a cohesive common goal.

(Of course, it’s possible that I’ve totally misrepresented Bo’s ideas here, so I welcome his input. Either way, I look forward to reading Bo’s ideas on this topic as he continues to flesh them out.)

Eric Hoffer on The Need to Adapt

“In times of profound change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” – Eric Hoffer

Thomas Jefferson on Tolerating Mistakes

“Here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error, so long as reason is left free to combat it.” – Thomas Jefferson

Hey! Board Member, Leave Those Teachers Alone!

A short piece from EdWeek tells us that education officials in South Carolina have scrapped a plan to grade that state’s teachers:

State education board members want to assure teachers they won’t implement the Education Department’s proposal to give teachers letter grades.

Board Chairman Dennis Thompson said Wednesday evaluating educators on an A to F scale is not going to work. The governor’s appointee, bank president Michael Brenan, says the concept needs to go. He says businesses would never evaluate employees that way.

This is very good news for both teachers and their students, but my real question is this: How many of these people are willing to apply their logic to the students in their schools? Are the teachers who are upset about being graded willing to rethink the way they assess their students? Are the officials who admit that “businesses would never evaluate employees this way” willing to acknowledge that it might not be in the best interests of kids either?

Given that kids don’t vote, my guess is that grades aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Nick Saban on the Growth Mindset

As a graduate of both the University of Virginia and the University of Alabama, I like to joke that Saturdays in the fall are a roller coaster ride for me–usually down with the Wahoos and way up with the Crimson Tide. (But who am I kidding? It’s no joke.)

Given the success he’s had over the last few years, Alabama coach Nick Saban has become something close to a deity in the eyes of the Tide faithful, second only to Bear Bryant in the pantheon. Although I consider myself an agnostic when it comes to the divinity of football coaches, I was pleased to see the following quotation from Saban in the New York Times.

“The way you learn is to make mistakes,” Saban said of his defense, which leads the nation in points allowed per game (9.1). “So if you can make a mistake, and learn from it, you’re progressing. If you make a mistake, and you’re frustrated about it, you’re not progressing.”

I don’t know if he’s read Carol Dweck’s work on the growth mindset, but he clearly understands the principle. No wonder the man wins year after year.

Four Years Later: A Reflection on the Election of 2008

I wrote the following in the wake of the historic 2008 presidential election. For obvious reasons, the events of the last few days have caused me to think about these issues all over again, so I went back and re-read my thoughts from four years ago. By and large, I stand by what I wrote. I do believe that many Americans society have shown a willingness to “set race aside” and focus on common concerns and values, and I still believe that is an important development in our nation’s history.

That said, I also recognize that such a claim could easily be exaggerated or even adopted by opponents of equality. In retrospect, perhaps I was too optimistic (on a number of fronts) in 2008. I notice now that my quotation of John McWhorter foreshadowed, in some ways, the claims of a “post-racial society” that peaked with Obama’s inauguration. But the “post-racial society,” however attractive it might appear to some, is a myth.

Dyed-in-the-wool racists may have been pushed to the fringes of society, but America is not “post-racial,” never will be, and–I would argue–should not be. Socially constructed though it may be, race is one important part of human identity, just as our genders, religious beliefs, political affiliations, etc. are part of our identities. To ignore race would be to ignore a part of who we are as individuals, and to ignore our racial history would be to ignore a part of our collective identity. That is not to say that our future should be determined by our past, but as a historian, I do believe that–whether we like it or not–our present and future are shaped by our past. Thus, it’s important that we understand it.

To claim that we are “post-racial” is to claim that we have moved beyond the influence of our history. I’m not sure if that’s even possible (I doubt it), but as this post shows, in the case of American politics, it’s simply not true. (For what it’s worth, take a look at a county-level map of 2012 returns. Obama’s support throughout the “Black Belt” remained strong, even as Mitt Romney swept most of the former Confederacy.) Think our history no longer matters? Think again.

Yes, we can.

Obama’s signature line, which clearly resonated with so many Americans, sums up what his campaign was all about. With his promise of “change,” he managed to turn out millions of new voters, most of whom seem to view him as the last great hope for a much-needed national revitalization project. Political buzzwords aside, many Americans–especially the ones that did support Senator Obama–expect a change not only in policy, but in the relationship between the American people and their government. “I’m asking you to believe,” reads the quotation from the top of Obama’s campaign website. “Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington… I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

Yes, we can.

To many in the African-American community, it seems that “we can” represents the logical culmination of “we shall”–as in “We Shall Overcome.” To see John Lewis and Jesse Jackson choking up and shedding tears on national television makes this link obvious. With that said, I was actually rather surprised by the media’s extraordinary focus on race in the immediate aftermath of the election. Of course, it’s to be expected given that we have elected the first African-American president in our nation’s history. The magnitude of that fact simply cannot go unrecognized. It is an extraordinary event, and as such, it deserves extraordinary coverage.

But at 11:00 pm on Tuesday night, just after they called the crucial West Coast states for Obama, the media (MSNBC, at least) chose to portray the victory celebration in a curious way. Immediately, they cut to Atlanta, flashing scenes of all-black crowds at Spelman College and Ebenezer Baptist Church across the screen. In doing so, they seemed to portray African-Americans as a group still somehow “apart” from American society. Perhaps it’s naive–especially for a historian of the South–but to me this seemed somewhat amiss.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that race was not a factor in this election. To anyone who understands “the arc of history” (in Obama’s words) in even the crudest of terms, it is undeniable. If you doubt it, take a look at the maps below.

The first map (courtesy of the University of Virginia’s Historical Census Browser) is of slave population by county in 1860. The counties in the darkest shade of green all had more than 5000 slaves just prior to the Civil War. The second map (courtesy of the New York Times) is of counties in the Deep South where Obama won a majority of votes on Tuesday. The connections should be apparent, and we know from exit polls that Obama received upwards of 95% of the “African-American vote” nationwide. Of course, Obama won none of these Deep South states, and perhaps that says something about American society in the 21st century, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Nevertheless, Obama ran not as an “African-American candidate,” but as an American candidate who happened to be of African descent. (I could make a tenuous claim about the political necessity of such a strategy and what that might say about American society, but I’ll leave that for another day as well.) Instead, at the risk of sounding more controversial than I really intend to, what I will say is this: those shots of Spelman and Ebenezer are not indicative of the “change” that Obama really represents.

I certainly understand the symbolism of Obama’s victory to African-Americans, and they have every right to celebrate this victory as their own. They have overcome, and so in a sense, we have all overcome. For that reason, November 4th, 2008 will go down as an important day in American history.

But the true genius of Obama’s campaign–and the reason for its tremendous success–could be seen not in Atlanta, but in Chicago’s Grant Park, where nearly a quarter of a million people celebrated victory. The crowd in Chicago included many prominent African-Americans, but it also represented a true cross-section of the American electorate. Citizens of every race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and age showed up to show their support.

Unreconstructed rebels may take issue with this next claim, but it’s only fitting that in a park named for a man whose military efforts helped end the Civil War and made it possible to put our great nation back together, Obama promised the American people–in terms that sounded not unlike Martin Luther King, Jr.–that “we will get there.”

In an interesting op-ed from earlier this week, John McWhorter suggests that of all the issues facing the United States today, racism is relatively low on the list in terms of urgency. “America has problems,” he writes, “and our new president knows it. However, is America’s main problem still ‘the color line’ as W.E.B. DuBois put it 105 years ago? The very fact that the president is now black is a clear sign that it is no longer our main problem, and that we can, even as morally informed and socially concerned citizens, admit it.”

McWhorter’s intent is not to deny the existence of racism in the U.S. Instead, he argues that American attitudes toward race have changed such that racism has become socially unacceptable, that out-and-out racists, while still around, have been pushed to the fringes of society. “[Y]esterday,” he writes, “we saw that this ‘out there’ brand of racism cannot keep a black man out of the White House. . . . Sure, there are racists. There are also rust and mosquitoes, and there always will be. Life goes on.”

He points out that when asked for his immediate reaction to Obama’s victory, John Lewis described it as “amazing–almost unreal.” McWhorter, however, concludes that “There is nothing at all ‘unreal’ about this. It is, after all, what we were supposed to be working toward. We must embrace it.”

Should we acknowledge that, even with the election of our first African-American president, racism still exists in our nation? Of course we should. But can we also say that the election of Barack Obama is proof that we, as Americans, have the capacity to set race aside and come together in the best interest of our shared future? Can we say that racial differences no longer define our nation?

Yes, we can.